Quote:
Originally posted by Timothy D. Ginn
Here's a few more reasons against frames:
Not very search engine friendly
Makes it difficult to bookmark specific pages within your site to easily return to
What happens if someone stumbles onto a page intended to be just a content frame and your navigation is in another one? ...confusion.
Also, here's a solution to a common problem:
For those looking to frames for an easy way to have standard navigation, take a look at SSI (Server-Side Includes). The free services are more likely to support them than they are to support a full-fledged language like PHP or ASP. It makes it easy to include a standard navigation menu, example:
<!--#include virtual="/navigation.txt" -->
Also, for those who do have access to PHP, you can set an option in the php.ini, httpd.conf, or .htaccess file to allow a common header and footer to be added to your pages.
Here's an example of how you would do this in a .htaccess file:
php_value auto_append_file "header.txt"
php_value auto_prepend_file "footer.txt"
There's an easy way to do the same thing in ASP, too. (I'm not quite sure what it is, off hand, but it shouldn't take too long to look up)
|
Frames can be search engine friendly when properly implemented. The key is proper head info such as meta tags in your head info. Also, the 'main' frame can be made search engine viewable in much the same way. If webmasters of frame sites are intelligent enough to use doctypes in the future, search engines will never stumble upon content frames. The problem is as usual, not the technology's fault, but rather a human screwed up somewhere.
The only problem with using SSI like that is that it behaves differently. The closest way to emulate the way a framed page works (wherein the two entities don't move together) is position: fixed through CSS, and that isn't yet properly supported by IE so it isn't used on pages. It also has some faults that I won't get into here. I use SSI on headers and footers for example, and I occasionally use frames. Both still have their place, and will continue to do so in the future. The other thing about your mentioned method is you're assuming the consumer is using a cache, and with the correct settings. Otherwise, they have a long time to wait for your page to load, especially if there's Flash or something to that effect on it.